Sunday, December 3, 2017

As most of you know, 4.3 will be one of the most content light major patches ever released on Rift. We're getting two things - a new T2 10 man raid, and a new mage soul - Mystic Archer, which will sell for 900 credits. This new soul is neither needed or wanted. Mages already have strong solo and leveling specs, and the real selling points will be as a tanking offsoul (which its deliberately unbalanced as) and PvP (because apparently no one learned any lessons about ethereal damage or extreme mobility from the past two expansions). We're also getting new upgrades to the crafted helmet and ranged weapon, which will cost 18 amenders and 80k captured intel.

Instead of heeding our feedback and focusing development on key sources of frustration in this expansion, such as the abomination that is the suffix gear system, planar fragment cost and RNG, massive cross-calling disparities and pigeonholed roles, we're receiving a patch that's half free despite having paid for the expansion (and we got so little of the advertised content on time with not even a semblance of an apology).

We're getting more suffix gear, which simply doesn't work with weekly lockouts and 10 week long active upgrade paths, a raid where 2 out of 3 bosses can't be melee'd (when 2 callings don't even have truly competitive ranged specs) and eternal weapon changes that will propel yet another calling into the 100k+ HPS tanking club.

Instead of the streamlined upgrade system we were promised that wouldn't cost three arms and five legs, our next upgrade paths for crafted items cost over half a month's worth of crafting cooldowns for 2 stages, several months of open world currency grinding, and a small fortune in celestial matrices. Furthermore, there isn't even a T2 helm in the Rift Store. You have no alternative to spending so much.

I, for one, am extremely tired of this extreme disconnect between the direction of development and the actual state of the game. I'm tired of Trion ignoring the overwhelmingly negative mood on the forums and that even the slightest hint of criticism in feedback gets it dismissed as toxicity. I'm tired of Trion rewarding self-righteous drama queen vandals that sabotaged the community.

Above all, I'm tired of development time wasted on an unwanted soul for immediate profit instead of issues that are actually in the interest of long term retention or acquisition of players. 4.3 makes it feel like Trion's mostly given up on boosting the playerbase and making it easy for returning players to get back into the game.

TL;DR: Don't encourage more of this and buy whatever is put in front of us.

Let's speak with our wallets and not buy Mystic Archer or spend money on Autumn Harvest.